Palu: More than a week after a major earthquake hit the west coast of Indonesia’s Sulawesi island, rescuers workers were focusing on Saturday on what looks sure to be a long, difficult search for bodies, many buried in appalling morasses of debris and mud.
President Joko Widodo has said all of the victims of the 7.5 magnitude earthquake and tsunami that struck on Sept. 28 must be found.
The official death toll from the quake and the tsunami it triggered has risen to 1,649, but will certainly increase.
Most of the dead have been found in the region’s main urban center, the small city of Palu. Figures for more remote areas, some just re-connected to the outside world by road, are trickling in.
No one knows how many people were dragged to their deaths when the quake triggered soil liquefaction, a phenomenon that turns the ground into a roiling quagmire. Communities in the south of Palu were particularly hard hit.
The national disaster agency says 1,700 homes in one neighborhood alone were swallowed up. Many hundreds of people are now entombed in slowly drying mud churned with heaps of debris and vehicles.
In the Balaroa neighborhood of Palu, rescuers found 34 bodies on Saturday, and laid them out in a row of blue and orange bags, among them 10-year-old Dede Aulianisa.
Her parents recognized her from the clothes she was wearing when the quake struck.
“I’m certain it’s her. She was wearing the exact scout uniform, with a sweater with the words ‘Geng 97’,” her father, Anwar, who like many Indonesian goes by only one name, told Reuters.
